tl;dr

Awesome! I came second on the fifth BETEO photography challenge with this entry, on the theme of Degeneration or Dilapidation:

Read on for some of my rejected pics as well as a discussion of how I took this one.

My first attempt was actually taken whilst I was getting my shot for Challenge IV, I took the pic below of a broken down pier on the waterfront in Newport. I very nearly revisited that and tried to frame a better shot of the same subject, but there was no suitable background elements. Thinking now a long lens and small aperture with a blurred background might have worked but in the end I concluded it was always going to just look like a jumbled mess because, well, it is.

I trekked out to Partrishow Church (which is so rural I can’t find it on Google maps, but it’s a few miles from the Abergavenny-Hereford road) for some gravestone pics, as I posted earlier in the thread, but I wasn’t happy with it. At the end of the day it’s just a lump of lichen. The gravestone pic someone posted is better than any of the ones I got that day.

I also had a day wandering around Penarth, on the grounds that nothing destroys things like the sea, where I took this picture of a rusted pipe cover. It’s OK but I wasn’t 100% happy with it.

That was going to be my entry until one day last week, when I suddenly realised that every day for the last four weeks I have been walking past the entrance to the staff car park at Cathays station, which has these rotting signs on it (despite not being abandoned at all). I can’t believe I didn’t spot it sooner (it’s actually literally next door to my office), with the possibilities of darkening the sky to an oppressive tone, the nasty curved spikes on the top of the fence, and the CCTV things being a sign of urban decay in general. It really was a good subject to fall into my lap like that.

As you can see in the pic below (which is a straight on humdrum shot of the signs), I shot it on a very bright, clear day and the background of the signs is just a normal car park and cityscape. To get the clutter out of the shot I had to come down low and shoot upwards (getting some odd looks from passers-by, I must admit). I battered the pic in Lightroom to drop it to B&W, darken the sky, and enhance the contrast quite severely (slightly too far, perhaps; the edges of the fence at the lower left look a bit off). DBSnappa suggested, and made for me, a further modified version with added film grain, which looked great but I concluded felt like cheating so I didn’t use it. I’ll have to get hold of some better photo edit software in the future.

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